Production Sound & Video

40 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2021 for their creative and design applications that filmmakers across the globe eagerly crave each new release from the world's first trillion-dollar company. That is why it was so surprising when Apple announced that they would be abandoning Intel processors in favor of proprietary, in-house hardware beginning within the year. The new Apple Silicon line is derived from the same ARM architecture that has powered Apple's extensive line of mobile devices since the release of the iPod in 2001, further narrowing the ever-blurring line between phones, computers, and tablets. This allows for direct cross platform support for apps initially developed and released for iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad, meaning users can access mobile apps and games on their home computer systems. The first of these new proprietary processors is the M1 chip, an all-in-one processing unit that streamlines under the hood performance in a great number of ways. Traditionally, the various processing devices inside of a computer each have been segregated from one another with each possessing a dedicated memory pool to cache data during processing. An inefficiency in this system has always been the need for redundant storage of the same data—with CPU's and GPU's requiring separate caches of the same information despite working together to complete a task. By integrating both central and graphics processing units into the same chipset, Apple has removed this limitation and allowed for a shared memory pool between devices. This allows the computer to do more work with fewer resources and reduces power consumption per watt. The end result is a chipset that boasts double the performance of both the CPU and GPU, which translates to 3.9 times faster video processing and 7.1x faster image processing across the company's entire line of Mac products. The introduction of an entirely new processing architecture presents numerous compatibility challenges from a design and engineering standpoint. In the past, it has largely been the responsibility of software developers to program their applications with support for the various architectures available on the market. In 2006, Apple circumvented this problem with the introduction of Rosetta, a binary translator application designed to read software developed for PowerPC processors by emulating that older architecture on the newly designed Macs. For the introduction of the M1, Apple has resurrected Rosetta (now branded Rosetta 2) in order to emulate Intel's x86 architecture across their new line of ARM-based computers. The result is near universal software compatibility with applications designed prior to this migration. Though these applications will not be able to take full advantage of everything the new system has to offer until updated by their respective developers, Rosetta 2 emulation does provide users an immediate means of transitioning to the latest Apple products without the frustrations of generational incompatibility. Additionally, the M1 chipset contains an emerging technology known as an AI accelerator, which Apple refers to as their Neural Engine. This technology has been present in the company's line of iPhone products since 2017 but the M1 variant is the first to be integrated into a personal computer platform. Designed to accelerate machine learning applications such as facial recognition and autonomous tasking, this Neural Engine boasts an incredible eleven trillion operations per second, positioning Apple to become the gold standard for the development and use of artificial intelligence applications as those technologies become more mainstream. The response ranged from profane outrage to skepticism to tears of joy. It was just over a year ago that Apple unveiled its new line of modular and customizable Mac Pro systems. An emphasis on first-party hardware raised concerns that third-party support for these expensive machines may dwindle, punishing early adopters and potentially robbing them of their investments. Consumers old enough to remember the problematic era of the PowerPC were hesitant " "...it was so surprising when Apple announced that they would be abandoning Intel processors in favor of proprietary, in-house hardware beginning within the year."

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